MoHUA will be felicitating 30 startups at a conclave to be held at the Ambedkar International Centre in New Delhi. Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) to provide an array of funding and incubation support to Startups to strengthen the sanitation and waste management sector. 

The day-long conclave will also be a platform to provide startups with a treasure trove of experience, knowledge and learnings which would help them to navigate their way in this sector and successfully take their solutions to scale. 

As part of the day’s deliberations, some Urban Local Bodies will be engaging in ‘reverse pitches’ to highlight specific ground-level challenges, in a bid to motivate startups to work on finding innovative solutions to the challenges. Taking the long-term approach of the government forward, some Urban Local Bodies have also evinced interest in partnering with select startups and providing them with support in the form of space for setting up facilities, market buyers’ linkages, etc, to pilot their solutions on the ground. 

MoHUA had launched a Swachhata Startup Challenge under the ambit of the Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban, from January 2022 onwards, in partnership with the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) and the DPIIT (Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade). The Challenge aimed to harness the entrepreneurial potential of the waste management sector in India and promote an enabling environment for enterprise development. Interestingly, a bottoms-up approach had been taken by MoHUA, through a Swachh Technology Challenge introduced in December 2021. 

The Technology Challenge invited entries and solutions from all stakeholders working in the sanitation sector, including NGOs, CSOs, academic institutions and startups. The winning entries received from startups in the Technology Challenge were allowed to participate in the subsequent Swachhata Startup Challenge in January 2022. 

The Startup Challenge sought entries from organisations in the Sanitation and waste management sector, across four categories, social inclusion, zero dumps, plastic waste management and transparency through digital enablement.